The block in every photograph on this site is a single 5 lb chestnut that went onto a shelf in the Grand Rapids workshop on a Monday morning. It was photographed at the same hour every day, in the same light, and nothing was done to it in between. No misting, no tenting, no fussing.
Days one to four look like nothing. That is the part nobody photographs and it is the reason people panic and interfere. The block is not idle, it is finishing colonising the last of the substrate and building the density it needs before it can afford to fruit. Interfering here is the single most common way to lose a block.
Day five brought the first pins, a scatter of pinheads the size of a grain of rice at the shoulder of the block where the plastic creases. Day seven they had bronzed and you could count them. Day nine is the photograph at the top of this page, and the whole cluster came off in one twist and weighed 940 grams.
Flush two arrived eleven days later at about six hundred grams. Flush three was a handful, and then it went in the garden. Total elapsed effort, from box to bin: about four minutes, all of it spent picking.
